


Tame Creatures

by fathomfive



Category: Wolf 359 (Radio)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern with Magic, Animal Transformation, M/M, Witchcraft, sci-fi found family fairy tale, technomagic, witch!Maxwell
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-14
Updated: 2019-05-14
Packaged: 2020-03-05 15:11:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 10,202
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18831190
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fathomfive/pseuds/fathomfive
Summary: Warren Kepler has always accepted the consequences of his choices - but Jacobi and Maxwell don't put much stock in how things are "supposed" to be.  When an old crime of Kepler's comes due in the form of a curse, they set out to do what they do best: the impossible.





	Tame Creatures

_(West of the moon)_

The door to the vault stood locked by spell and iron. Jacobi crouched in the hall outside, setting the last of the charges. According to the blueprints, he could blast through the wall without causing too much damage to what was on the other side. But they were backed into a corner now, and there was no time to check his calculations. He punched in the arming sequence. Twenty seconds. Then he jogged back down the hall to where Maxwell stood guard.

He passed the body of the witch as he went: a thin man still clutching a length of knotted cord in both hands. They hadn’t been able to stop him from sealing the vault before he died. But as Maxwell always told him, witchcraft cast in haste was rarely complete. And, well. Explosives worked on almost everything.

Maxwell had her gun trained down the dark hallway in the direction they had come. Her witchlight hung in the air over her head, casting a faint radiance.

“We good?” she said.

“Fifteen seconds,” he said, tugging absently at the protection charm around his neck. “Might want to cover your ears.” He pressed his back to the wall and waited, breathing in time with the countdown in his head.

On their comms, Major Kepler breathed too, harsh and uneven. He was on the other side of that iron door, trapped in a vault designed to drain its oxygen when the lockdown spell was triggered.

“Twelve, eleven,” Jacobi murmured.

“Don’t blow up our boss,” Maxwell said in the same murmur. Her witchlight flickered with suppressed agitation.

“I can hear you, you know,” Kepler rasped, sounding a hundred miles away on a sea of static.

“Seven,” Jacobi said. “Six, five. I’ve got it. Don’t worry, sir.”

“I’m not,” Kepler said, and the wall blew. The line shrieked with feedback, and a plume of dust spilled into the hall.

“Go,” Maxwell said. “I’ll keep our exit clear.”

Jacobi pulled his shirt over his nose and mouth, and plunged into the haze. He walked right into Kepler. For a moment they were very close, Kepler’s hand trailing along his forearm—then Kepler let go as if burned, and they both stepped back.

In his other hand Kepler held a padded case: the experimental drug samples they’d been sent to recover. Riding high on the moment, Jacobi couldn’t keep from grinning at him. The heat, the smell, the taste on the air—it was good. It was what he was made for.

“Told you I had it,” he said. What he’d really meant was _I’ve got you_.

Kepler’s mouth opened. Something flashed across his face for just a moment before he caught it and wrestled it down. He looked like he’d had his name called unexpectedly in a crowd. He stayed silent for just a little too long, his eyes fixed on Jacobi’s face.

“And I told you,” he said finally, “that I wasn’t worried.”

Twenty minutes later they were in the Jeep, doing seventy down a dirt road toward the lowering sun. Kepler drove, as always, like car accidents were something that happened to lesser people. Maxwell had done something to the Jeep that made its motion smooth and all but soundless—the spell’s metallic tang still hung in the air. She was hunched over her tablet in the back seat now, lost to the world. Jacobi sat in the passenger seat and watched Kepler in profile. He was hidden behind aviators, the burn of the late-afternoon sun pouring over his face and hands.

“Huh. That’s new,” Maxwell said.

“Problem, Maxwell?” Kepler said.

“Not mission-relevant,” she said, and in his periphery Jacobi saw curls tumbling as she shook her head. “Just checking in on a personal project.”

“See that it doesn’t distract you,” he said. But he seemed distracted himself, his mouth pressed into a thin line. He kept staring straight ahead down the sunwashed road.

Jacobi twisted around in his seat and raised his eyebrows. She pushed her tablet forward.

At first he thought it was some kind of graph. The line swooped and spun, traveling along an axis simply labeled _now_. As he watched it move, describing some endless form, he felt the subtle trademarks of Maxwell’s magic. The buzz on his skin, the taste of salt and metal. Text blipped in and out in time with the motion of the model.

ONE CONSEQUENCE REPAID, EFFECTIVE IMMEDIATELY.

THE HEART IS A HUNGRY ANIMAL.

FIFTY PERCENT CHANCE OF SNOW ON MONDAY.

“I see your problem right there,” he said. “No one wants any of that shit in a fortune cookie.”

“And that’s why I consult you on these things,” she said, rolling her eyes fondly. “No. Cards don’t agree with me, so I thought I’d try another method of divination. But the output is a lot more erratic than I expected.”

“Any idea what it means?” he said.

“Best guess? That I need to write a new program,” she said. She settled back in her seat, eyes fixed on the endlessly unspooling line.

On the plane ride home, sandwiched between Maxwell and the window, Jacobi dreamed.

There was something wrapped around him. Coiled around him, really, the shifting muscle of a massive, feathered thing that smelled like musk and moving water. They breathed in time. Each of his breaths was a struggle against the pressure on his chest, and he was losing. But he felt no urgency about it. He felt lightheaded and limp and absolutely warm.

“We’ve landed,” Maxwell said, very clear, right up against his ear in the darkness. He woke up.

It was cool and bright on the airstrip out by Goddard headquarters. Jacobi lagged behind as they crossed the tarmac to the hangar, still dizzy with the closeness of the dream. Up ahead, Maxwell was saying something to Kepler as they walked, their heads bent close together.

Jacobi watched them: one compact, curly-headed figure and one strong and lean. Some people spoke about the moment their lives had fallen into place and they’d seen the big picture, a puzzle in which everything had a place. In church, maybe, or at the altar. Jacobi found it a little laughable—if you thought life made sense, you weren’t paying enough attention. But he knew how his personal world was best arranged.

He quickened his stride and caught up to walk on Kepler’s other side. Maxwell caught his eye and smiled. Kepler allowed their shoulders to brush briefly. They headed inside.

They didn’t see hide or hair of Major Kepler for the next week. That in itself wasn’t unusual, and there was plenty of work from Special Projects to occupy them both anyway. On the night before their next mission assignment, Jacobi dreamed again.

He dreamed of the day Maxwell had given him the charm around his neck. It was only a few months after she had joined the team, but by that time he loved her more than he’d thought he could love anyone. They were at her desk, overlooking a spread of strange odds and ends: wire and plastic, beads and animal bones, scraps of cloth and twists of paper.

“It’s easier if you’re here for this part,” she’d said. While he watched, she assembled the pieces with a jeweler’s finesse, sure of where each one belonged. What she made was a thumb-sized agglomeration of strange parts held together with wire. The skin of his face prickled. He tasted sea air and metal.

“This will keep you safe,” she’d said—not explaining, but because the act of saying made it true. The air hummed against his skin. “You hear me?” she said, with fierce intention. “No one will work magic on you against your will. You’ve kept me safe, and now I’m going to do the same for you.” She pulled a length of cord and cut it, and looped it around the charm.

Here was the unreal part: Kepler was there. And when Maxwell looked up and said, “Sir,” he reached down and put his finger on the knot.

He was not looking at either of them, only at the shining geometry of the protection charm under his hand. He held it in place while Maxwell closed the loop. When she was done, he took his hand away, and Maxwell tied the charm around Jacobi’s neck.

Jacobi woke up and knew immediately that he wasn’t going to get back to sleep. Instead he shuffled into the kitchen and stood there in the dark eating cornflakes straight from the box. Light pollution threw a haze over the stars. In the dark outside the window, nothing moved.

He was somewhere far off in his head. The charm lay on his chest, its weight an afterthought by now—it had been years. He fiddled with it, feeling the ridges of wire that bound it together. It took him too long to realize that his phone was ringing.

By the time he made it back to his room and dug the phone out from under the covers, it was silent. He checked the log: _One missed call – Major Kepler_.

The phone buzzed and a text notification blipped up on the screen. _Wrong number. Don’t worry about it._ He started running his thumb over the pendant again, urgently this time. It was three in the morning.

The sun came up, and Jacobi went to work to find his and Maxwell’s new mission briefing. They learned that over the past week Kepler had been gathering intelligence in France, and now the two of them were to join him for the next phase of the operation. They flew together and split at the airport. Maxwell went to assume her cover identity and meet with the target, while Jacobi went to rendezvous with Kepler.

It was early evening by the time he made it into Paris. His GPS was on the fritz, and he followed its increasingly cryptic directions into a poorer part of the city. They led him to a nondescript walk-up in a gray stone building. It was rush hour, and the endless droves of strangers surged and parted around him, all heading elsewhere. He climbed the narrow stairs to an equally narrow hall. The door at the end had been revarnished so many times that its surface was wrinkled and shiny, old blemishes showing through underneath. The key he’d been given turned haltingly in the lock.

Inside, there was water running.

“Sir?” he said. “Sorry I’m late.”

“Stay where you are,” Kepler said, far off and indistinct amidst the sound of the water. It sounded like a sink running on full blast, rattling the pipes.

“Sir?” Jacobi said again. He followed the sound of the water. It led him to the doorway of the tiny kitchen, where he stopped to try to understand what he was seeing.

Kepler was at the sink, turning his hands under the running water. His bloodied shirt lay on the counter. Feathers were sprouting from his shoulder blades, running down his arms and the crooks of his elbows to his wrists. They were lovely, black and fine, and they left red welts where they grew.

When Jacobi moved in the doorway, Kepler’s head jerked around.

“Get out,” he said, his voice flat with menace.

Jacobi crossed the kitchen in two steps and stopped with a hand hovering over Kepler’s wrist. Kepler moved to face him—it was sudden as a flinch, but it felt more like a lunge just barely restrained. His eyes were at their most peculiar under the fluorescent lights, amber and depthless. His lip curled in the beginnings of a snarl.

“Get. Out,” he said again.

“Not until you tell me what the hell is happening to you,” Jacobi said.

“I don’t have to tell you anything,” Kepler said. “This is _none_ of your business.”

Jacobi laughed, and that was what made Kepler flinch. “You’re always my business,” Jacobi said. “We’re tied together, or isn’t that what you wanted? Ever since you walked into that bar in San Francisco. Since before that.”

Kepler showed his teeth in a perfunctory and entirely humorless grin. “Careful, Mr. Jacobi,” he said. Quick as a snake, he caught Jacobi’s wrist in a bruising grip. His fingers were like ice. All at once Jacobi realized how close they were standing. Cold water tricked down his arm. He could feel the warmth of Kepler’s bare skin, and he could smell blood.

“What’s happening to you?” he said.

Kepler’s gaze slid away. He dragged the pad of his thumb across Jacobi’s inner wrist. It felt good, and Jacobi tried not to say something monumentally stupid like _Please do that again_.

“Consequences,” he said. “After things have progressed far enough, my duties will be transferred to Major Riemann. I expect you and Maxwell to continue fulfilling your own duties as ordered.”

“What the fuck?” Jacobi said. He yanked his wrist back, and Kepler fought him for a second before letting go. “You—I don’t even know what to say to that. _How_ is this—”

“You say, ‘yes sir,’” Kepler said. All of a sudden he seemed a thousand miles away, a glacier of insurmountable height. He turned the faucet off. When he pushed past Jacobi and stalked out of the kitchen, Jacobi didn’t stop him. He stood there, staring at the bloody shirt on the counter.

Maxwell arrived just after midnight. She came in looking tense but pleased with herself, and presented Kepler with a napkin scrawled with an address in ballpoint pen. He got up from his place on the worn couch, where he had been cleaning his gun, and plucked it from her fingers. Her nostrils flared, and she lifted her chin to stare at him.

From across the room, Jacobi recognized the look. It was how she looked at particularly interesting horrible things that she wanted to understand. She wasn’t usually reckless enough to look at Kepler that way, but he suspected it was always there, at least a little bit.

Kepler let the ensuing pause go on far too long. “Doctor,” he said finally, deceptively mild. “Good work.”

Maxwell hesitated. Kepler had, at one time or another, used “good work” to mean _you’ve surprised me_ , _stop talking to me_ , or _I’m going to snap all your fingers off and feed them to you._ And once or twice, he’d used it to mean _good work_. Now he gave her a caustic little smile and tucked her offering into the loose work jacket he was wearing. He returned to his gun.

Over his head, Maxwell caught Jacobi’s eye and mouthed, _What’s eating him?_

Jacobi made a slicing motion at his throat. She raised her eyebrows. He shrugged and looked away.

In the small hours of the morning they tracked Maxwell’s target across the city to the specified address. Jacobi liked foreign cities. He liked the new food and the unfamiliar sounds in the streets, and the way you could step fully into your anonymity and disappear. But Paris was lost on him today. Now that he knew about it, he could see Kepler’s discomfort every time his shirt and jacket dragged across his shoulders. Every so often he would slide his fingers under his sleeve, realize what he was doing, and take them out again. And Maxwell was watching them both.

By the time the sun was up, burning steadily through the morning mist, their target was at the bottom of the Seine. They had acquired a stolen hard drive’s worth of proprietary robotics data: a precious cargo that likewise vanished into Kepler’s coat. The morning was chilly and bright.

Back at the apartment, Maxwell paced the boundaries of the tiny flat with slow deliberation, tracing forms on the walls with her fingertips. The shape of the leave-no-trace spell filled the cramped rooms like an invisible balloon, sending prickles across Jacobi’s skin.

Jacobi sat on the couch and followed her with his eyes, fascinated even though he’d seen the spell worked half a dozen times before. Kepler never shared that fascination. He had always seemed to accept witchcraft as one of Maxwell’s functions, to be put to use like any other. And right now he was otherwise occupied. He had the first aid kit open in his lap, and he was cleaning the long shallow cut along Jacobi’s throat.

Normally he’d have a few choice barbs about getting within arm’s reach of the target when you weren’t prepared to fight. But right now he was rigid and silent and much too close, holding his shoulders stiffly inside the loose jacket. Jacobi wondered if the feathers hurt. He wondered if they were going to be wings.

“Stop moving,” Kepler murmured.

“It’s not that bad,” Jacobi said. He watched Maxwell pace, her eyes half-shut, writing symbols only she could see. In his periphery Kepler scowled.

“An inch to the left and your own heartbeat would have bled you dry,” he said. “Stop. Moving.” He pressed the cotton swab to Jacobi’s pulse point. Jacobi hissed. The cold stink of the rubbing alcohol was making him dizzy, raising gooseflesh on his throat.

“Sir,” he said. “We have bigger things to worry about, don’t we?”

By the window, Maxwell turned her head.

“We do not,” Kepler growled.

“No,” Jacobi said. “Someone’s working magic on you. We need to know what’s going on.”

“What?” Maxwell said. There was a brief hum as the air pressure in the room fluctuated. Jacobi’s ears popped. Maxwell let her hands drop, and whatever unseen lattice she had been weaving around them shuddered and collapsed.

She approached the couch, and Kepler shifted his weight as though about to stand. She stood over him, eyeing him intently. “So that’s what I smelled,” she said. “ _Please_ tell me you were going to mention this.”

Kepler drew his hand away from Jacobi’s neck. He seemed to be fighting himself. Jacobi watched, rapt, as he tamed his expression into one of cool indifference.

“I’ve already told Mr. Jacobi that it’s none of his business,” he said. “Doctor, the same goes for you.”

“Sir, this is exactly why—” she drew herself up, hurt flashing across her face. “I can still make you a protection charm. That’s not an offer any more, it’s a professional request.”

Yes, your continued insubordination is the very _picture_ of professional,” Kepler drawled. “A charm would be pointless, anyway. This goes deep.”

“Then we get rid of the witch,” Jacobi said. Kepler’s lip curled.

“Do you really think I would have let them live?” he said. “This work was always meant to last. It’s—old business. None of your concern.”

“Major, please,” Maxwell said, all confused frustration at the thought that there was a problem she wasn’t being allowed to solve. “I can _help_. Just let me figure out how.”

Kepler looked between them. Jacobi knew his own expression was stricken. He didn’t know how to hide it just then. A slow, sardonic smile played across Kepler’s face.

“I know,” he said, “that you’re worried. But there’s no point, because I’ve already given you your orders. Get over yourselves, and do. Your. Jobs.”

Jacobi stood up so quickly his head spun. Maxwell pressed her lips together and looked away, her face pale. Kepler looked up at them, still wearing the same smile, and Jacobi saw from this new angle how precarious it was. He could not tell what lurked underneath.

“Do our jobs,” he said distantly, through the buzzing in his head. “Of course, sir. You’re right.”

The apartment was silent as Maxwell gathered the loose threads of her spell. When she was satisfied that no one would be able to track them, they headed headed for the pickup point, a small commercial airport outside the city. Maxwell slipped past Jacobi to claim the passenger seat, and this time he let her. He watched Kepler in the rearview, and listened to Maxwell’s rapid typing. Kepler’s granite expression gave nothing away.

Jacobi sat in the back and tried to gather himself. If he moved wrong his anger would burst through his skin like spikes, or fledging feathers. He was used to being angry at Kepler, in the usual, passing way, but this was something else. He was angry at the rest of the world too, because something in it had made Kepler helpless, and he wouldn’t tell Jacobi what it was.

Jacobi had burned for him in all senses of the word. Every obstacle he was pointed, at he sent to kingdom come—as he would again, and willingly. With pleasure. He didn’t know a better way to announce himself. But all that, and Kepler wouldn’t tell.

“Targeted data this time,” Maxwell said to herself.

“What?” Jacobi said, forgetting that he was supposed to be stewing in silence.

“Oh—thinking out loud,” she said. “Sorry. Personal project.”

They sat together on the plane ride home, Kepler in the row in front of them. He did a very good job of pretending to sleep, but he didn’t seem to be able to press his back flat against the seat. When they hit cruising altitude Jacobi made a give-it-here gesture and Maxwell put her tablet in his hand.

 _How can we fix this_ , he typed.

 _Whatever the spell is it’s rooted deep_ , she wrote back. _Hard to dig out. Need more info_.

 _But you can do it_ , he typed. She gave him a look. He shrugged—dumb question.

 _Time is the problem_ , she wrote. She could do anything if she had the time to figure it out. _Now shut up and let me work on it_.

“I wasn’t talking,” he said.

“Oh my god,” she said. “Here, finish the chips.” She dug the bag out of the seat pocket for him. He leaned on her shoulder and watched her start to tinker with the divination program and its endless line.

CHANCE OF SNOW AT SEVENTY PERCENT, it said. CARNIVOROUS IS INTIMATE. The Atlantic, wreathed in clouds, sped by below them.

Kepler vanished not long after debriefing, leaving them to their own devices. Maxwell plunged into her lab, waving Jacobi off and saying, “I’ll call you when I get somewhere.” When he passed by later in the day she had pulled all her curtains and taped a manila folder over the glass pane in the door.

Kepler called the next evening, while he was running tests on a new pressure-activated explosive trigger. Development was ahead of schedule, but he wanted to set something on fire. By the time he’d shed his protective gear and closed up the testing range for the night, the only thing awaiting him was a three-second voicemail.

It was just silence. He listened to it, and then listened to it again, and unease filled him like waves running up on the shore. He called back and got no answer. Kepler’s voicemail was off, so he called twice more on the drive home. Standing in his dark kitchen he spent ten minutes trying to compose a text that didn’t sound too histrionic—why was he worrying? What was _wrong_?

 _What do you need?_ he sent eventually. He fell asleep waiting for an answer.

The next morning, all onsite Strategic Intelligence personnel were summoned to a company briefing. Jacobi headed to Maxwell’s lab to retrieve her—he knocked, got no answer, stuck his head in, and was confronted with what she had spent the last thirty-odd hours doing.

She’d pushed all the worktables to the walls. Her desk sat in the middle of the room, in the center of a ring of loose paper, and every sheet was covered with her tiny, neat hand. Odds and ends sat on the papers, in blank spaces where the words broke and flowed around them. He saw a bullet casing, a scrap of denim, a bottle cap. The air stank of magic, and he reeled for a moment.

“All work and no play, huh?” he said, rubbing at his eyes. The writing looked like code, but he suspected Maxwell was the only one privy to its lexicon.

She poked her head out from behind the computer, blinking at him. “Are we due for lunch already?” she said.

“That’s Thursday,” he said. “It’s a briefing. What the hell is all this?”

“It’s—Kepler,” she said. “In extended description.”

Jacobi crouched to look at the teeming lines of text. His gaze seemed to blur and slide away from them every time he tried to focus. He read, _Improvised melody all internal avows control._

“Uh, yeah,” he said. “Clear as mud, thanks.”

“Basic witchcraft,” she said. “You can’t do anything to anything else unless you know, as exactly as possible, what it is. To act on the universe you have to define it. I’m defining him—or trying.”

“You’re trying to figure out what’s wrong with him,” Jacobi said. He looked at the spell array on the floor. It had been months since he’d seen Maxwell work in longhand, and he understood it about as well as he had that time. Which was to say, barely at all. “You wouldn’t be making that face if it was working,” he said.

Maxwell pinched the bridge of her nose. “I’ve never done divination this in-depth before,” she said. “Something’s out of reach.”

They made their way to the briefing in thoughtful silence. Mr. Cutter and Rachel Young were there, standing on the low stage under the window. Cutter was surveying the room, his head cocked. Young was talking quietly with the man who stood between them.

He was not large, but he had the fixed and penetrating gaze of a big cat or a wolf. He held himself very straight with both hands clasped behind his back. When Cutter leaned close to speak to him too, he didn’t flinch.

Once the rest of the Strategic Intelligence had arrived, Cutter clapped his hands for attention. He only ever needed to do it once. The room hushed.

“Thank you all for coming,” Cutter said. He spread his hands, smiling his televangelist smile. “I have some important news to share with you. Major Kepler will be stepping down from his position with Goddard, effective immediately.”

The silence broke with sudden murmurs, and more than a few people looked at Jacobi and Maxwell. Jacobi glared. Cutter turned his palms up, waiting. Young cleared her throat pointedly.

“Of course, we’re all very sad to see him go,” Cutter said. “But happy trails to him, of course! And we have no intention of leaving his position unfilled. Major Victor Riemann will be joining the Strategic Intelligence command staff—say hello, Victor!”

The man next to him gave a curt nod. He did not say hello.

“Major Riemann is eminently qualified,” Miss Young said, picking up smoothly from where Cutter left off. “He’s been working with Goddard intelligence for quite some time now, and he’s proven his dedication many times over. No transition is without bumps, of course, but we expect all of you to put in the effort needed to make this as smooth as possible.”

“Quite some time?” Jacobi muttered. “I’ve never heard of him.”

“Me neither,” Maxwell said.

Cutter’s head swung in their direction, and he regarded them for a moment, his smile never wavering. His eyes were very pale, almost colorless. “You’ll all have the chance to get to know Major Riemann soon enough,” he said. “After all, quarterly reviews are almost here. And we have _so_ much still to do.”

By silent mutual agreement, Jacobi and Maxwell lingered in the conference room after the briefing was over. Young and Major Riemann breezed past them, and as they did, Young looked them over with a tiny, condescending smile.

“Daniel, Alana,” Mr. Cutter said, as they approached the head of the room. “What can I do for you?”

He was still on the stage, and they stopped before the three shallow stairs that led up to it. Jacobi did his best to mirror Cutter’s smile, realized he was grimacing, and gave up.

“Sir,” he said. “We have some concerns about Major Kepler.”

Cutter tilted his head. “I suppose you would,” he said.

“We know someone’s working magic on him,” Maxwell said. “Changing him. But we don’t know what’s really going on.”

Cutter crossed the stage and stepped lightly down, hands clasped behind his back. He was not much taller than Maxwell, but there was a fluid menacing confidence in the way he moved. Jacobi saw her lean back a little.

“Your point?” he said.

“I—what?” Maxwell said. “Sir, we want to help. We can’t do that unless we know the full story.”

“And you think I do!” Cutter said, as if she had just paid him a compliment. “Or maybe you think I had something to do with it?”

Maxwell opened her mouth, and then shut it again.

“Oh, _kidding_ ,” Cutter said. “I have my talents, but I’m happy to leave the witchcraft to those born to it. Although it’s true that you can turn a person into practically anything these days. It’s a new age, after all.”

Jacobi felt himself go red with fury. Maxwell squeezed his elbow.

“Nevertheless,” Cutter went on, “I didn’t do anything to Warren. It’s just his curse coming due.”

“His _what_ ,” Jacobi said.

Cutter paused, regarding him as if over a great distance. “A little memento of his first mission for Goddard,” he said finally. “If he never told you, then it’s really none of your business, Daniel.”

“But sir,” Maxwell said. “Surely it would be more—efficient to break the curse. From a personnel standpoint.”

“ _Ohhh_ ,” Cutter said, dragging the word out, his mouth forming an _O_ of fake astonishment. “Why, Alana, listen to you! That’s sweet!”

“Mr. Cutter, if there’s anything you can tell us,” Jacobi said. “We just–”

“What is it that Warren always says?” Cutter broke in. “About his whiskey. About how he much he _likes_ it.” He waited, and Jacobi realized he was meant to finish the thought.

“He likes it, but he doesn’t need it,” he said dully.

“Exactly that,” Cutter said. “ _Exactly_ that. That’s what Warren is to me, and he understands that. He’s always known the risks. Very few curses get broken, you know.”

“We’re good at doing what very few people can do,” Jacobi said.

“Give us the chance, sir,” Maxwell said. “Please.”

Cutter made them wait for it. He circled them and climbed the steps to the stage again, watching them the whole time. Despite the smile still pinned on his face, his gaze was keen and empty. He crossed behind the dais on the left side of the stage, and straightened the lone pen on top of it.

“What are we here for, if not to push the boundaries?” he said. “Just the one chance, then. Don’t waste it.”

“Thank you,” Jacobi said, trying not to slump.

“Anyway, I’m not the one to ask about curses,” Cutter went on, taking his phone out and placing it on the dais. He swiped a hand over it, scrolled, and pushed it forward as it began to ring. “Don’t waste her time, either.”

“What, Marcus,” said the woman on the other end of the line.

“Miranda,” Cutter sang, like it was the most beautiful name in the world. “You’re on speaker. Dr. Miranda Pryce,” he said, aiming this last at Jacobi and Maxwell. Jacobi felt Maxwell stiffen at the name. “An expert. In fact, Alana, her work is a lot like yours.”

“A witch,” Maxwell said.

“Yes. What do you _want_?” Dr. Pryce said. “Make it quick.”

“It’s about Warren,” Cutter said.

“Who?” Dr. Pryce said.

“You know,” Cutter said, with exasperated fondness. “Warren Kepler. SI-5?”

“Oh, that one,” Pryce said. “He’s still around? You told me he broke a witch’s pact.”

“Well, the curse has only just kicked in,” Cutter said. “Who knows why—all that was years ago. But you know how finicky these things can be.”

“Wait, wait,” Jacobi said. “Major Kepler made a witch’s pact? And then he _broke_ it?”

“Well, I needed him to, you see,” Cutter said.

Maxwell’s jaw was taut. Jacobi pressed his shoulder against hers—he wasn’t sure which of them he was trying to comfort.

“He made a pact, and then he broke it,” Dr. Pryce said flatly. “He’s reaping what he sowed, and in full knowledge. I don’t see what the problem is.”

“Indulge me, Miranda,” Cutter said.

“Marcus,” she said. There followed a long silence, heavy with things Jacobi did not want to know about. And then: “Well. You two, if you want to get anywhere you’ll have to divine the specifics of the curse. Do you know how to do that?”

“I’m writing a program,” Maxwell said. “It’s—getting there.”

“If you’re working for us I’ll assume you’re not a complete amateur,” Pryce said. “But it could take months if you don’t know what you’re doing. The base schema I’d use is this.” She rattled off a long list of programming paradigms Jacobi had no context for. He assumed Maxwell did, from the way her eyes lit up.

“With that, you can design a query that will return fairly detailed divination results,” Pryce went on. “These things tend to be traditional: a paradox riddle, an impossible task, that kind of thing. Once you get to that point you’ll understand that most curses can’t be broken at all, not under normal conditions. Don’t bother me about this again.”

The line went dead.

“ _Thank_ you,” Maxwell said—perversely, she really seemed to mean it. Cutter smiled at them.

“Take care of this on your own time or not at all,” he said. “The company aims are paramount. Remember that.”

Back in Maxwell’s lab, Jacobi watched her pace circles around her computer and its spell-circle. She dove into her drawers and started digging through her components, and Jacobi recognized things here and there: a scrap from one of his old MIT hoodies, one of Kepler’s whiskey stones. He hadn’t gone further than the doorway—there was nothing he could do here, and he recognized the signs that she was already miles away. Anyway, he had his own idea about what to do next.

“Pulled pork or roast beef?” he said.

She paused in the middle of examining a bent brass key. “Pulled pork,” she said. “And a Red Bull. Two Red Bulls.”

“You got it,” he said. “Back in a bit.”

He dropped off her lunch and ate his own while working, doing his best to race through his assignments before something new came down the pike. After a few hours he had to lock his own lab to keep curious SI agents from trying to prod him for information on Kepler. He finished in the late afternoon, shot Maxwell a text he knew she wouldn’t see, and left Goddard headquarters on the northbound freeway.

It took him about an hour to reach Kepler’s apartment. He was not particularly surprised when no one answered the door.

He picked the lock, made a face at the security camera under the eaves, and slipped inside. No one emerged to point a gun or a supercilious expression at him. He shut the door and stood just inside the threshold, listening for anything besides silence.

He’d been inside Kepler’s place a handful of times before, one of which he barely remembered because he’d been dazed and bleeding all over himself at the time. He remembered his head lolling back on the couch. Kepler’s hands on his face. The lights had been too bright, and there was a painful tugging at the skin of his forehead.

“Thirteen stitches,” Kepler had said, while his face swam in Jacobi’s vision. “Ridiculous. You’re going to have to be more careful.” He’d leaned out of view then. Jacobi tried to move his head to follow, but that just hurt more. He’d said something stupid like, _Hey, come back_.

“I’m right here,” Kepler had said, holding Jacobi’s head in place.

Now, Jacobi pressed his fingers to his temple and felt the scar.

The sun was sitting low on the horizon. Dust had gathered on the coffee maker and the countertops, hanging in the harsh glow of late afternoon. Jacobi went to the study and found the desk similarly untouched. Kepler’s laptop and phone were stowed in the compartment underneath. Jacobi turned them on and left them there to power up, and went to check the bedroom.

He’d never been further than the study, and now he had to stop at the bedroom door. The room was wrecked. The mattress had been dragged half off the bed and into the doorway, and it was scored with long slashes. The blankets were twisted and spilling onto the floor. The pillows were in shreds. Mixed with their flimsy down were larger feathers, gray-black, patterned with subtle variations on the color of night. Jacobi picked one up.

The smell of it catapulted him back to his dream. Animal musk and suffocation, and the sense of something very large, very close. It only lasted an instant. He stumbled back out of the doorway and back into the study.

The laptop was waiting for a password. He knew the phone’s passcode: 1968, the year of _Electric Ladyland_. The laptop’s wasn’t the same, and after a few tries he gave it up.

The phone had a very long list of contacts, most named simply by initials, and Jacobi saw that his own number was the most recent call. His heart tripped and he felt angry and stupid and hopeful all at once—where would they be now, if he’d picked up? He wrestled the feelings back down and kept looking.

Before powering the phone off Kepler had signed out of his email and file-sharing apps. There were very few photos: off-the-cuff surveillance images, a menu from an obscenely expensive Greek restaurant, a few sidelong snaps of Maxwell and Jacobi alone and together.

They weren’t doing anything in the pictures. Just talking, or eating, or focusing on their respective work. In one, they were leaning over the railing of a ferry with the sprawling blue radiance of the sea behind them. Maxwell was grinning—she’d just said something funny. Jacobi had his head thrown back, laughing with his eyes shut and his hair standing up in the wind.

What the phone did not have were convenient notes about safe houses or anti-magic contingency plans. Kepler did not seem to have had a contingency plan. That was an unsettling realization, because when the world was in its proper order, Jacobi was Kepler’s contingency plan. The state of the bedroom suggested that even if there had been a plan, Kepler might not have been able to enact it. The ruined bed, the shed feathers—the place had been ripped apart in the throes of pain or fear or fury.

Jacobi put the phone in his pocket and shut the study door. Before leaving, he took three dark feathers from the ruined bed.

It was dusk by the time he made it back to headquarters. He knocked at the door of Maxwell’s lab and let himself in. He was met by a sensation that was like walking face-first into a cobweb: something unseeable and fine stretching across his face and clinging to his skin. He shook his head and the feeling dissipated. The taste of salt and metal coated his tongue.

Maxwell looked up from her computer. “Watch out for that,” she said. “I’ve been testing some things.” She kept typing, and the fans in her computer began whirring audibly faster.

“Making progress?” Jacobi said, approaching the desk gingerly. He stopped just short of the circle of paper on the floor. It felt like a brewing thunderstorm in here, invisible currents raising the hair on the back of his neck.

“More than I expected, thanks to Dr. Pryce,” she said.

“Listen, I went to his place,” Jacobi told her. “Whatever was happening to him, it’s—he’s gone.”

Maxwell stopped typing. Jacobi reached into his coat pocket and offered her the feathers.

She took them as though they were naked blades. He watched her turn them over, lean close, smell them.

“Oh,” she breathed. “That’s something new.”

On her screen, the line of fate unwound at the same measured pace it always had. Text flashed by beneath it, garbled and too quick to read.

“It’s him, but not,” Maxwell said. “It takes a powerful curse to transform someone that way.”

“How do we know it’s not too late?” Jacobi said. She didn’t answer.

Instead, she handed two of the feathers back to him. Still holding the third, she got up from the desk and went to crouch at the edge of her circle. She put a hand out, feeling some invisible topography in the air above the papers, and when she found a spot she liked, she placed the feather between two lines of text. Again Jacobi felt that strange sensation in the air, like many tiny filaments pressing against his skin. Static electricity popped at his fingertips, and for a moment the salt taste was so strong that he gagged.

With his other hand he felt for his pendant and gripped it hard between thumb and forefinger, its uneven edges digging in. The spell-sick feeling receded. “Warn a guy first,” he said.

“Sorry,” Maxwell said, not sounding sorry at all. “This is—this changes things.”

On the computer screen, the model stopped. The loading bar flashed up for a fraction of a second and then the line was moving again, and the words were back, scrolling steadily down the screen like rain on glass.

Maxwell scrambled back into her seat. Jacobi leaned over her shoulder and together they scrutinized the lines of text. It looked like code written in a fever dream, recursive and barely holding on to meaning.

“The syntax of these results is complex, to say the least,” Maxwell said, more to herself than to Jacobi. “Dr. Pryce wasn’t kidding when she mentioned paradox riddles. I don’t know if my parser can handle it, but I’ll try.”

“Uh-huh,” Jacobi said, trying to sound encouraging. He watched as she brought up another window and typed a command.

The stream of output changed from a garbled flood to shorter chunks of text. Jacobi squinted and caught only gibberish: _if the coat of the skin disavowed heart remains untraceable. If unbroken, substitute for blood. Parsing error. The animal remains untraceable. Parsing error. Parsing error._

Maxwell made a frustrated noise and jabbed at the keyboard, adding a string of new commands. The output shrunk further still, to a series of lines that repeated themselves over and over again.

_The violator of this pact is condemned by his treacherous heart. He must guard his heart for all his life, and when he fails, it will be his undoing. He will become a beast and flee into the wilderness, afflicted by a terrible thirst._

_One who returns his love must seek him out, and slake his thirst with water that does not run. Only then will he be delivered from the skin of the beast. If he is not delivered he will forget himself. He will fly from every place that was once safe, and not be found._

Jacobi became aware that Maxwell was squeezing his shoulder. He licked his dry lips.

“Does it do rhyming couplets?” he said. “I just—feel like it’s missing that little something-something. You know.” He felt small and exposed and shaken and triumphant, all at once. _Condemned by his treacherous heart_ thundered around and around in his head.

“Uh,” Maxwell said. “Ye-es. I suppose it doesn’t really scan. Daniel, does he—” She broke off, staring at him intently.

“Does he what, love me?” Jacobi said. “Love, period? I don’t know, you think I know?”

Kepler would not admit any such thing. But he’d put his needle through Jacobi’s skin, and sewed him back together.

“Only thing I know,” Jacobi said, “is that I can hold up my end of it. Seek him out, et cetera. I guess we’ll find out the rest when we get there.”

Maxwell looked at him for a long time, and he knew she was cataloging everything he’d said. She rarely bothered with mercy, but she had always done him the kindness of pretending not to notice how he felt about Kepler.

Jacobi shifted a little under her gaze. “Guarding my heart’s not really my strong point,” he said

“Never has been,” she said, and gave him a rueful little smile. “But I kind of like you that way.”

She stood and he followed, chasing the steadying pressure of her hand. Then they were standing face to face in the glow of the monitor, and something else occurred to him. “Oh, you’ve got to be kidding me,” he said.

“What?” she said.

“All he had to do,” Jacobi said, “was fucking _ask_.”

Neither of them went home that night. “Finding things is easy,” Maxwell said, as she cleared her desk. “Well, easy for me.” She went through the cans of Red Bull clustered at the corner, picking them up one by one until she found one that still had some in it. She knocked the rest back, and Jacobi made a face. She rolled her eyes.

“With the work I’ve already done,” she went on, “I have pretty much everything we need.”

She looked drained, though. He didn’t mention it. Instead he helped her go through her supplies, setting aside what she asked for. A spool of red thread, a salvaged hard drive, a fistful of paper clips and beads. He’d seen her work finding magic before, but always with the components prepared ahead of time—one of the benefits of reading your mission briefings.

She put the drive into the dock by her computer, and the air swelled with nascent magic once again. “Help me out here,” she said. “You’re going to be the conduit.”

Jacobi held his hands out. She pulled a length of thread and tied a knot around his left thumb. “Focus,” she said. “Think about him. Think about what we’re going to find.”

She began to weave the red thread in an elaborate witch’s ladder between his fingers. Over and under, across and behind, like a game of cat’s cradle with power humming in its lines. She stopped every so often to add a bead or a paper clip or some other tiny bauble. Jacobi held still and followed her instructions.

He thought about Kepler, with his sure and ruthless hands. He remembered the way those hands had splayed over his face, holding steady, gun callus pressed against the line of his jaw. He thought about the timbre of Kepler’s voice and the shape of his smile and the hundred mannerisms he knew by heart.

They could get him back. _He must guard his heart for all his life, and when he fails, it will be his undoing._ Kepler must have assumed it would never be an issue. But he’d demanded everything from Jacobi, and that meant something of his belonged to Jacobi too.

Maxwell was concentrating on her own part of the spell, and it was an almost tangible feeling. The room had felt very small in the past hour, but now the walls seemed to draw inward. The computer chimed to signal that the download was complete.

Maxwell took the hard drive from the dock and threaded it into the center of the lattice. She reached into Jacobi’s coat and drew the second feather from his pocket, and tied it to the end of the thread.

The thread looked still, but against Jacobi’s skin it felt like it was vibrating. The disk began to spin. Jacobi’s hands swung east, drawn by a line of invisible force, and he did not resist.

“Boom. Kepler GPS,” Maxwell said.

“You’re unbelievable,” he told her, half-teasing but with real awe. She grinned, and then swayed and caught herself on the edge of the desk. Jacobi reached to steady her before remembering that his hands were immobilized.

“If you squish it—” Maxwell said.

“I’m not gonna squish it,” he said. He slid the lattice carefully off his fingers and onto the desk. “You’re wiped out,” he said. “Take the office couch. We can leave in the morning.”

“He’s getting further away,” she said. “You can feel it now, can’t you?”

“Yeah,” Jacobi said after a moment. It was faint now that he’d laid down the witch’s ladder, but he _could_ feel Kepler, on the other end of a long, fine tether anchored somewhere in his chest. The knowledge made him shiver. “We’ll catch up,” he said, and was surprised to find that he believed it. “He’s not getting away any more.”

“You have to sleep too,” she told him, smacking his shoulder lightly. “Quit making that face.”

“I’m not making a face,” he said.

“You are,” she said.

“Okay, so what if I am,” he said. “Go to sleep. I’ll see you in the morning.”

 

* * *

 

_(East of the sun)_

In the morning they drove east. Maxwell took the wheel, and Jacobi sat in the passenger seat with the witch’s ladder strung between his fingers. His skin tingled—he was a compass, he was an antenna. The sky darkened with the promise of foul weather.

They drove for two days, out of the valley and through the desert toward the Rockies. The mountains stood at first far on the horizon, and then startlingly near under a layer of heavy clouds. They crossed onto the Plains on the third day, and that was when it snowed. They pulled over at a roadside cafe and spent most of the morning there, watching the plows rumble past. On the scuffed linoleum table, Maxwell began to assemble something.

She half climbed across the table to get the third feather out of Jacobi’s coat pocket. He dumped another tiny cup of creamer into his coffee and watched her wind red thread around its base, securing it to a handful of mismatched trinkets she pulled from her own pockets. A shard of glass with the edges rubbed smooth. One of her own hairs, yanked from the root. He pulled his own protection charm up in front of his face to inspect it.

“I thought it doesn’t work unless he helps you,” he said.

“That’s the way,” she said grimly, twisting thread and hair together between her fingers until they formed one taut strand. The coffee in her mug rippled away from her, and Jacobi put a hand over his own mug just in case. The taste of blood rolled over his tongue. “He has to allow it—to _want_ me to protect him,” she went on. “One of the downsides of everything being tied together.”

“And if he doesn’t?” Jacobi said.

Maxwell’s hands stilled. “Then I have the charm ready, and I’ll fight him on it for another two years if that’s what it takes,” she said. There was no trace of hesitation in her voice, but her expression was pinched and unhappy.

“And you’ll get him,” Jacobi told her. He reached out and ran a finger over the charm on the table—its parts were intricately bound, both fragile and inextricable. “This is what we are,” he said, “whether Kepler likes it or not.”

She looked at him consideringly. He could practically see her gears turning. In that moment he was sure that they could break a curse, any curse.

The sun came out in the afternoon and started melting the snow into slumped drifts on the roadsides. Puddles refracted to the sky. Two hours out of Colorado, they passed an exit and Jacobi’s hands swung violently to the right. His knuckles cracked against the door, the feather trembling in its nest of string.

“Go back go back go back,” he said. Maxwell picked up speed to the next exit so they could double back. It took them through a four-way intersection where a gas station, a laundromat, and a pizza restaurant all faced one another: the only buildings for at least a mile. The rest of the town, if there was one, seemed to have been scattered to the winds by a careless hand. Homes and barns were dim shapes in the distance.

The witch’s ladder sang in Jacobi’s hands, its vibrations thrumming through the bones of his fingers. He leaned forward, pointing through the windshield at the bleak windswept fields sprawled out before them.

“That way,” he said. “We’re close.”

Maxwell picked up speed, heading along a narrow country road. Jacobi steered them off onto a service road that dead-ended at the base of a rise. They rumbled up the gravel drive until there was no more road left to follow, and Maxwell killed the engine. Jacobi sat still for a moment, straining to feel through the witch’s ladder, orienting himself. Then he slid the lattice off his fingers and onto the dash, and got out of the car.

At the top of the rise a few hundred yards off was an abandoned barn. Wind and weather had reduced it to the same indeterminate gray-brown as the surrounding landscape. Jacobi started moving, drawn by some residual vibration from the witch’s ladder, or perhaps some deeper knowledge. He was halfway up the drive before he realized what he was doing.

Maxwell caught up to him, each step punching through the skim of half-frozen snow on top of the gravel. Her chin was up, face turned into the wind; she could sense something he couldn’t. But he knew this was the place.

He kicked at the snow underfoot, then bent and scooped as much as he could into his cupped hands. His skin prickled with the shock of cold. He began to climb the rise.

It didn’t look high, but it took them longer than he expected to reach the top. The sky was a bright uniform gray, all clouds. They and the barn cast no shadows. Jacobi stopped before the door. He was starting to lose feeling in his fingers.

The handles were scaled with rust, and the damp wood seemed to radiate cold. Now that they were closer he could see that part of the roof had caved in. He and Maxwell exchanged a glance. They knew, if nothing else, how to walk into danger together. He nodded, and she seized the handle and pulled.

The door rumbled aside on its rusty track. The floor inside was rotted out, strewn with old hay and splintered timbers. At the far end of the barn, something shifted in the dark.

Jacobi plunged into the cool interior of the barn, walking too fast, his feet catching on uneven spots in the floor. The smell brought him back to his dream: animal musk, dry grass and water. He wasn’t afraid, but he was shaking all over with the feeling of anticipation or inevitability or _something._ The snow was melting steadily in his hands.

“Daniel!” Maxwell hissed, and followed him inside. She caught up to him just as the shadows moved again. They both halted, pinned to the spot by two glaring amber eyes.

Jacobi met them for an instant before they receded back into the darkness. Maxwell lifted her chin.

“Come out where we can see you,” she said.

There was a growling huff so familiar that Jacobi wanted to scream. Then the creature Kepler had become moved out into the light.

It was a bird, or something like one. Only there were no birds ten feet tall, that crawled on winged forelegs and back legs bowed like the legs of a dog. It came just into the margin of light at the edge of the ruined roof. Jacobi could hear his own pulse pounding in his skull, and behind it, Maxwell’s quick and shallow breathing.

Jacobi met the creature’s eyes again. “What,” he said. “Didn’t expect us to come after you, did you?”

That got him another growl. Maxwell leaned in.

“Daniel,” she murmured. “I don’t think he can speak.”

They both paused to consider that. Jacobi had spent the last four years with a string around his neck, finely woven of all the things Kepler said and did not say. He’d be lying if he said he didn’t like the pressure.

“If that’s really it, you don’t know us as well as you think,” he said. “Did it even occur to you to ask?”

All at once the creature surged toward them and reared overhead, planting its arm-wings on either side of where they stood. The light went away, and they were in a cocoon of dark feathers. Its closeness was dizzying and warm, and its eyes burned like searchlights.

“Well, tough,” Jacobi said. “Because we’re here now.” He craned his neck to look up into that narrow, hungry face. “We know about the curse. We know why this happened.”

The creature’s beak snapped open and shut, _clack-clack_ , like breaking bones. It snaked its neck down to stare him in the face, and he could read the challenge there.

“Don’t give me that,” he said. “I _know_ why this happened. And I’m telling you I can help.”

The creature froze with its neck arched, staring at him. Its claws scraped pensive scores in the soft wood underfoot.

“It will work,” Jacobi said, more gently.

Maxwell took the new charm from her pocket and held it up. “There’s nowhere you can go where we won’t find you,” she said. “You did pick the best.”

Jacobi raised his outstretched hands. After so long still, the movement sent pins and needles burning up his arms. His hands were trembling, all of him was trembling, and the water slid in icy rivulets over his thumbs. After a long moment, the creature that was Kepler lowered its head and drank.

Its beak drew blood on Jacobi’s palm, and he shivered, his heart beating fast. In moments the water was gone and the creature withdrew, shuddering all over like a tree in a storm. It folded forward, pulling its wings over its body, and Jacob let his hands drop and rushed forward.

He pushed his damp and bloodied hands into the creature’s feathers. It seemed smaller now, and its skin was slumping, growing strangely loose. He found purchase and pulled, and the skin tore away like velvet.

The feathers sloughed away and he felt human skin underneath, smooth to the touch and shivering. His fingers burned as warmth began to come back to them. He dug his hands in and pulled, and the skin of the beast slid in pieces to the floor.

And then he had his hands in Kepler’s hair, carding through the strands and leaving blood and water behind. Kepler caught his hands and Jacobi felt every callus and scar he remembered. Almost gently, Kepler moved his hands away and then let him go.

He was kneeling naked on the floor in a mess of dark feathers, and his lips were blue with cold. For a moment none of them moved, and then Maxwell struggled out of her jacket and draped it over his shoulders. It was much too small. He looked up at her, his expression blank, and nodded.

She nodded back. Kepler’s gaze landed briefly on the charm dangling from her fist. Then he turned to Jacobi.

Jacobi had run out of things to say and do and think; all but the one thought, which was for the man in front of him. He knelt, and reached out again with both hands.

Kepler’s neck stiffened as Jacobi cupped his face. Then he let Jacobi pull him in until their foreheads were pressed together.

“So it worked,” he said hoarsely.

What Jacobi had thought was a blank look was actually one of wide-eyed intensity—he was eating Jacobi up with his eyes, looking at him like he was the one still point at the center of the spinning world. It was all Jacobi had ever wanted.

“So it works,” Jacobi said. He felt Kepler tracing the now-healed wound on his neck with a finger. “Uh,” he said, leaning into the touch. “I have clothes in the car.”

Kepler gave a soft huff of laughter and pulled back. “I—yes,” he said, and shivered. “Thank you.”

Jacobi stood up, his face burning, dizzy with joy and vindication. “Why don’t I go get those right now,” he said. Maxwell shot him a knowing grin.

He went back to the car in a haze, the fire inside him stoked and leaping high. His heart was going too fast still and his hands and arms ached and he felt incandescent and alive. He got his duffel bag out of the car and went back to the barn.

Maxwell was kneeling where he had been. The protection charm hung between her hands, suspended on red thread. Kepler was looking at it with an unfamiliar graveness in his expression. He took it from her, and bent his head and tied it around his neck.

Jacobi offered up the bag. Kepler pulled on a pair of his sweats, and made a face at him when the first shirt he found was the one that said _No Wait,_ _It_ Is _Rocket Science_. He shivered again and began to put it on—gooseflesh and blue fingertips, he was just human, and very cold.

**Author's Note:**

> if we want the rewards of being loved we must submit to the mortifying ordeal of turning into a giant bird monster, etc.
> 
> songs for this fic:  
> Animal Life - Shearwater  
> Song for Zula - Phosphorescent
> 
> I have wips for this fandom that are NOT extremely niche aus, but I dropped everything to get into the weeds on this (I realized too late that turning sci-fi into a fairy tale requires a nonzero amount of worldbuilding). trying some new things here, I'd love to know what you think!


End file.
